Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry
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Night Boat to Tangier

by

Kevin Barry

(Author)

3.9

-

5,447 ratings


ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “A darkly incantatory tragicomedy of love and betrayal ... Beautifully paced, emotionally wise.” —The Boston Globe

In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen—Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs—sit at night, none too patiently. The pair are trying to locate Maurice’s estranged daughter, Dilly, whom they’ve heard is either arriving on a boat coming from Tangier or departing on one heading there.

This nocturnal vigil will initiate an extraordinary journey back in time to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals, and serial exiles. Rendered with the dark humor and the hardboiled Hibernian lyricism that have made Kevin Barry one of the most striking and admired fiction writers at work today, Night Boat to Tangier is a superbly melancholic melody of a novel, full of beautiful phrases and terrible men.

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ISBN-10

1101911344

ISBN-13

978-1101911341

Print length

272 pages

Language

English

Publisher

Anchor

Publication date

July 06, 2020

Dimensions

5.15 x 0.75 x 7.98 inches

Item weight

8.4 ounces


Product details

ASIN :

B07LDTLNLJ

File size :

2372 KB

Text-to-speech :

Enabled

Screen reader :

Supported

Enhanced typesetting :

Enabled

X-Ray :

Enabled

Word wise :

Enabled


Editorial Reviews

"A pleasure to have and hold." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Dark, haunting. . .Gripping. . .[It] calls to mind Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. . .Barry’s a remarkable sentence-level writer who’s capable of extraordinary turns of phrase. . .Night Boat to Tangier is remarkable, a novel that's both grim and compassionate, and it features gorgeous writing on every page. Barry never asks the reader to pity his characters; rather, he makes it nearly impossible not to relate to them, which is a remarkable trick.”—Michael Schaub, NPR

"Kevin Barry channels the music in every voice, from lowlife philosopher to slow-footed thug, ponderous wit to fluting child — and the comic genius in everyone, whether unfunny fool or God’s own comedian." —Ellen Akins, The Washington Post

“[A] high-low style of philosophical clowns out of Beckett or Jez Butterworth. . .Kevin Barry has a fine instinct for the sweet spot where the comforting familiarities of genre blend into the surprises and provocations of art. . .Barry has a great gift for getting the atmospheres of sketchy social hubs in a few phosphorescent lines, and much of the pleasure of the book is in being transported from one den of iniquity to another, effortlessly and at high speed. . .If you like your dark deeds illuminated by Dostoyevskian insight this might not be the book for you. But the sheer lyric intensity with which it brings its variously warped and ruined souls into being will be more than enough for most readers. It certainly was for me.” —James Lasdun, The New York Times Book Review

"A darkly incantatory tragicomedy of love and betrayal, haunted lineage and squandered chances. . .Barry rightly landed on the Booker Prize longlist with this, his beautifully paced, emotionally wise third novel. Spare in its prose, capacious in its understanding, it’s as eerily attuned as his last one, Beatlebone, to the ancient spirits that flit through the Irish landscape, and as festering with unsavory personages as his debut, City of Bohane. . .Barry will lull you right under his spell and into a wary sympathy for the pain of these men with their battered, hopeful hearts." —Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe

"Goodness, can the Irish talk? And can Barry write? Yes and yes." —PBS NewsHour

"Let me sing you a love song about Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier. As much as a book about two criminally minded old Irishmen sitting at port, shooting the shit, and looking for a daughter gone missing can be a love story, this is a grand one. . .The book is brutal and funny about sadness and pain and I dare you to find a more narratively or stylistically thrilling chapter than “The Judas Iscariot All-Night Drinking Club." The prose is a glory. . . Hilarious, and seedy, and thrilling, but it’s more than that, too, because in the end, the reader has to reckon with what it means to glamorize violence and Rumblefish-style machismo." —CJ Hauser, The Paris Review

"Tautly written. . .Dreamlike." —The New Yorker

"Try the name Flann O'Brien. Try James Joyce. Try Roddy Doyle. Try Patrick McCabe. Try Wilde, try McGahern, try Behan. And now try the name Kevin Barry. See how it fits in perfectly among the others--Kevin Barry is one of the most original, daring, and seriously funny writers ever to come out of Ireland. I'd walk a hundred miles for a new Barry book and I would make the happy journey home, laughing." —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin

“You read this, and you can tell Barry doesn't take his sentences lightly. It'd kill him to mess one up. And he doesn't waste them. So what you get is his style's flawless, and yet it isn't soft. There isn't anything nice about the story, just that it's told beautifully.” —Nico Walker, author of Cherry

“It’s a Kevin Barry novel, so the brilliance is expected; everything else is a brilliant surprise.” —Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

"I devoured Night Boat to Tangier. I loved the potent truth of it all, drenched in damage and romance. The Barry turn of phrase is a true wonder of this world.” —Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers

“A bloody mighty novel. It's audacious, but also it's Kevin Barry at his most tender. The novel carries a beautiful, mournful undertow to it, which is particularly affecting in a book so heavy with old myth and new poetry. May he keep twisting literature forever.”—Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies

"Wildly and inventively coarse, and something to behold. As far as bleak Irish fiction goes, this is black tar heroin."—Publishers Weekly

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About the authors

Kevin Barry

Kevin Barry

Kevin Barry is an Irish writer. He is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels. City of Bohane was the winner of the 2013 International Dublin Literary Award. Beatlebone (2015) won the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize and is one of seven books by Irish authors nominated for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award, the world's most valuable annual literary fiction prize for books published in English. His 2019 novel Night Boat to Tangier was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. Barry is also an editor of Winter Papers, an arts and culture annual.

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Reviews

Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5

5,447 global ratings

Michael Kiefer

Michael Kiefer

5

Superb

Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2024

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Beautiful language. Wonderful understanding of his subject. Barry has written a memorable and invigorating book.

Lee Quarnstrom, author of WHEN I WAS A DYNAMITER

Lee Quarnstrom, author of WHEN I WAS A DYNAMITER

5

"WAITING FOR DILLY?" YES, AND HERE'S A PLOT! BE PATIENT AND ENJOY THE FABULOUS WRITING.

Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2019

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Night boats to Tangier come and go as two old buddies, Irish hard men who've shared lifetimes of law-breaking adventures and heart-breaking romances, wait at a Spanish seaport hoping one's estranged daughter will arrive on a ferry from Tangier -- or show up to catch a boat going the other way. The tumble of words spilling from the mouths and minds of the pair are grand and beautiful on their own; fortunately for readers wondering if there's a story here, there is! It's a sordid tale, it seems, of booze, heroin, crime and, at the center of it, a romance that is so fine that we know, because these two aging crooks are, after all, Irish literary creations, it is doomed by excess and jealousy and alcohol and drugs and worse! Those evils can result in no good for the two old buddies. They are great compadres and great rivals, too!

Because the two men are waiting at the ferry terminal for a daughter who seems to be one of a horde of dreadlocked young people swarming indolently across the Spanish landscape, because they are waiting for Dilly, the 23-year-old daughter of one of the men, this novel has been compared with Beckett's "Waiting for Godot." I think it is richer, more subtle, more wonderful!

Does Dilly show up? Find the answer to that question is just one of the reasons to read this beautiful piece of prose!

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31 people found this helpful

Leslie Kelsay

Leslie Kelsay

5

Masterful dialogue, poetry as prose

Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2019

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Two Irishmen, aged out of the drug trade, wait in a Spanish ferry terminal anticipating this is the night they will find Dilly, the daughter of one of these shipwrecked souls. She's coming in from Tangier. Or going to. They haven't seen her in three years.

Their dialogue across 24 hours of waiting and flashbacks to their years of want, fulfillment, addictions, loyalty, betrayal, vengeance, business-like violence and atonement is dark, lush, cryptic and revealing. Their youth is the father of their first years of old age.

It's funny. It's gritty. It's one of the top reads of 2019 for me.

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20 people found this helpful

Roger Walkup

Roger Walkup

5

Even Reprobates Love their Children

Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2020

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I read Kevin Barry's "City Of Bohane" on my kindle and knew that future Barry books would be hardback. My wife and I loved it. If you're at all like me, you also read the negative reviews to see why people don't like a book.

Some people don't like the fact that Mr. Barry does not use quote marks and they felt lost and jumbled between dialog and description. It's true, he does not use quote marks; neither does Cormac McCarthy. If you pay attention to what you're reading, it's easy to tell the difference between dialog and not dialog. If you are a stickler for quote marks, this book will not be pleasant read.

Some people felt that the two main male characters were so reprehensible that they could not like them and so could not like the book, some to the point that they could not finish the book. If that is one of your criteria, you may not like this book. I, on the other hand, like Dostoyevsky and I cannot think of a major character in any of his novels that I would describe as pleasant.

One person described the people in the book as misogynistic. Knowing that the main characters were part of the criminal class in the British Isles, I had a suspicion what the issue was before I read the book. Now that I've read it, I'm certain: it's the use of the dreaded "C" word. It is used 8 or 9 times . Some people in the UK and Ireland use the C word in largely the same way Americans use the the 7 letter slang term for anus and most of the characters in this book fall into that group of people. For what it's worth all of the female characters in this book are stronger people than the two main protagonists. If the use of the C word in dialog will upset you, this book is not for you.

I don't mind lack of quote marks, unpleasant main characters, or the use of the C word. I loved the writing, plot (yes, there is one) , and even the characters. I plan to read it it again at least twice.

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5 people found this helpful

Tracy Brown

Tracy Brown

4

Still u sure what I think of this book…

Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2021

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This is another book group read. I wasn’t smitten with this book. About a fourth of the way through, I found myself wondering why I was reading about these awful people. Still, it was so lovingly recommended that I insisted on finishing it so I could decide what I thought of it.

Now that I’ve finished it, I find myself asking what was this book about? On one level it’s about the friendship between these two men, Charlie and Maurice, from this youth through their adult years. They did their best to destroy their friendship and their lives.

The mystery in all of this is Maurice’s daughter Dilly. I can’t decide if her fathers obsession with her is an unhealthy one. It is I believe, but maybe not as sick as I’d suspected. I was happy that she decided not to stay around he father and his best mate. She found a sort of freedom, while the others took a lifetime to find any sort of peace!

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2 people found this helpful

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